Momentary Marriage(94)

He saw stark emotion flash in her eyes but couldn’t read it. She stood there in a defiant, defensive stance, a wounded woman against the men of the world.

“Maybe it’s because your own father abandoned you, I don’t know, but you’ve obviously never learned to love or trust a man,” Jared said in a rough voice.

He raised a hand to still the retort he could see was coming. “I know you’ve got your reasons. Your father never loved you enough to show up, none of your step-fathers ever hung around. Every man you or your mother has ever loved has left. But that doesn’t mean that all men can’t be trusted!”

“Leave my mother out of this,” she said fiercely, dashing an angry hand across her eyes.

“I’ll admit I didn’t tell you everything in the beginning,” he said, suddenly feeling incredibly weary. “I did encourage Amy to shake things up with you and Doug.”

“You son-of-a-bitch,” she spat. “Didn’t it matter that when you were telling her to leave Doug, you were sending her thousands of miles away from me? Sending my only sister away?”

“She was being hurt,” Jared said, meeting her gaze steadily. “You’ve been clinging to him, taking comfort and affection without even being aware of what he needed in return. I don’t think you ever meant to hurt either one of them, but he was perfect for your needs. Caring, affectionate, consistent—you got all that with no risk of being hurt. It’s been the same with us. You married me on the condition that there was no feeling. No love.”

“Neither one of us wanted love!” she said vehemently.

“I know you don’t believe people can love each other for a lifetime. You can’t trust that kind of emotion to last,” he said, his words hard with the anger and loss in his gut, “but have you ever considered that you might be so afraid of being hurt that you’ve never given love a chance? That maybe you’re wrong about love not lasting?”

“What do you mean?”

“Not every man is like your father,” he said. “Some men can be trusted to love a woman forever.”

He saw the startled expression in her face as he turned toward the elevator.

Pausing, he said. “I can’t fight this battle for you, but I’d suggest you find your father. Maybe seeing him will help you move on. Help you be able to give some man a chance.”

Kelsey watched him leave, tears burning in her throat. Her head pounding, she stood in the empty lobby and saw the closing of the elevator door in slow motion.

Clapping a hand over her mouth, she tried to muffle the sobs storming from her. Bitterly she cried, unable to stop, the tears streaming down her face, her sobs echoing in the cold stone lobby.

He was gone. Everything was gone.

She leaned against the wall, throwing her arm up to hide her ravaged face. It seemed like hours before the crying subsided, but no one else came through the lobby and she finally felt the wrenching sobs ease. Outside the double doors, dusk had shifted to darkness.

Standing there, leaning against the cold marble wall, her throat felt raw and her head pounded, feeling stuffed and cottony.

How did people survive this? Even walking out of here seemed impossible. Just moving through the doors so Anthony could get her a cab would take more energy than she had left.

Kelsey leaned limply against the wall, staring into space, Jared’s words starting to spin in her head. She heard again his accusation, “You’ve obviously never learned to love or trust a man.”

He saw her as…unable to love? As wounded and unable to trust even the trustworthy?

Since the time when she was small, she’d asked her mother about her and Amy’s real father. Why didn’t they see him? Why didn’t they take a taxi to his house like some of her friends did to their fathers on the weekend?

Kelsey couldn’t even remember what her mother had said. It had just always seemed accepted. She had a father, but he wasn’t in her life, didn’t apparently want to be. Over the years as one stepfather had merged into another, she’d begun to see the trend and to…depersonalize her own father’s absence.

It was a man thing—conceiving children and moving on. Certainly the moving on part was indelibly printed on her brain, although she did acknowledge that her mother had left several of her husbands rather than the other way around.

Was Jared right? Did she have to come to terms with her own father or spend the rest of her life in the lost place of the last few weeks?

Straightening, she ignored her pounding head and made her way to the door, wiping at her eyes. Everything was a mess. Jared had lied to her about her sister.